In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.